Fire Baby

As you know from my last post, we started off Mother's Day by burying Howie's grandmother in Long Island. Before heading to the funeral we had time to squeeze in a Mother's Day cupcake for breakfast along with some Starbucks coffee. Yum! We got to LI a little before the funeral, just in time for a quick lunch at a diner. I had a super greasy and extra tasty bacon cheese burger with sauteed onions. Why not? Aislinn enjoyed some strawberries that I brought for her and then she had some of grandma's toast and I think some of grandpa's french toast. When we finished up there we went to the cemetery and waited for Howie's grandma's body to arrive. We talked to the Rabbi about his grandma. While we were there Aislinn kept wanting Howie's mom to hold her and kept giving her kisses like she knew she needed a little extra love. It was sweet. She was being cute and making everyone smile even though it was a sad day. She makes everything better. During the actual burial Aislinn was getting hungry and a bit cranky so I put her down on the ground and she picked some little buttercup flowers that were growing in the grass. It was getting a bit cold and she had a sweater on but Howie took off his jacket to put around her. She put it over her head and was walking around with it dragging on the ground. We started to laugh because she looked like ET. After his grandmother was buried the Rabbi came over to talk to us and Aislinn gave him one of the flowers she picked and he said thank you. For the first time ever she didn't seem to want what she had given away back. We made her a bottle when we put her into her carseat and she she had finished it before we even left the cemetery. She was pretty good on the way home. She didn't sleep. She had slept for maybe about an hour, maybe less, on the way to LI but on the way home she didn't sleep. Anyway, when we got home it was a pretty normal night. She played, then we fed her dinner, and then it was upstairs for her bath. Her head felt a bit warm to me when we were getting her ready for her bath so we just quickly just used the ear thermometer. We know it's not the most reliable but we figured if she had any kind of fever it would let us know and then we'd do the more invasive rectal temp. The ear thermometer said she was fine so we put her into the bath and she was having a good time, as usual, until the end. She started to shiver so we figured it had something to do with the bath. I wrapped the towel around her and we took her into her room. She was still shaking like crazy so I put another towel around her and then Howie put a blanket around her. She continued shaking and looking really tired. We quickly got her dressed and then brought her down stairs. It was pretty early for her to be that tired but we were thinking that maybe she was just worn out from all the running around during the day and the fact that she had only taken a short nap in the car. We decided to give her a bottle so Howie went to go make it. I sat down with her on the couch and read Snuggle Puppy to her. She usually points out that the puppy has a ball when we read it but she didn't do that this time. She was sweet enough to give me a kiss at the two places in the book where I'm supposed to give her a kiss. She's such a sweetheart! Anyway, after reading the book I tried to give her the bottle but she barely opened her mouth which really weird because no matter how tired she is she is always happy to take a bottle. I still felt like her head was warm even if the ear thermometer said differently about 45 minutes before. Her body was hot too. I asked Howie to take her temperature again which he did and this time the ear thermometer said 102. We decided at this point that we should take her temperature with the rectal thermometer. That one said 103.3. We called her doctor's office and the answering service said that someone would call us in about 20 minutes. We called our parents, his said to put her into a cool bath, my mother (a former nurse) said to go to the ER. I kind of felt like since she was so out of it we should just go to the ER, which we did. When we got there her fever had gone up to 103.6. The ER doc said that her left ear was really red and he thought that it was the reason she had a fever. They gave her some Tylenol, Motrin & Amoxicillin and had us wait an hour and took her temp again. It was down to 102 and she started to perk up a tad. A half hour later the doc came back and said that we could go home once the nurse stopped by to give us a prescription for the amoxicillin. The nurse stopped by and also took Aislinn's temp one more time. It had gone down to 100. When we got home we gave her a bottle which she happily drank and then we put her down for the night. We checked on her once during the night and she seemed cool so we didn't worry too much. I got up at 6:15 am to head over to the fertility clinic for my monitoring and was back by 7:15 am. Aislinn and Howie were still sleeping so I curled back up in bed and Howie and I woke up around 9:00 am. We called her doctor and they said that we could just walk in between 9:00 and 10:00 am without an appointment. We woke Aislinn up and she was burning up again. We were going to quickly give her some Tylenol but we were all out. Yeah, I felt like an idiot! How can I not know the bottle of Tylenol is empty? How can I not have like 2 back up bottles? What kind of Mom am I? So we got her dressed and Howie made her a bottle for the car, which she pushed away. When they took her temp at the doctor's office it was 103.7 and she was barely moving again. They gave her some Motrin and the doc took a look at her ears. He said that he didn't think they looked too bad and there wasn't any fluid in there so he thought the redness was more of a symptom of the fever than the cause. Her throat was red so he took a couple of swabs to get a culture for a strep test and the quick test said it wasn't strep but they sent out the second swab just to be sure. He then wanted to rule out a UTI or kidney infection so we tried to get Aislinn to pee into a bag but she wasn't drinking any fluids so who knows how long we'd have to wait for a bit of pee, plus the pee in the bag wouldn't necessarily be sterile enough so we might have had to catheterize her in the end anyway so we just decided to let them put a catheter in so that we could get a urine sample. That was awful! I hated it and I know she hated it too. I hate bringing her in for shots but I really felt guilty about letting them poke and prod her but we needed to rule that out and it looked like the urine sample was clean. So, the next thought is that it's just some kind of virus or whatever and we just have to try to keep her fever down and get her to drink. He said we could take her home to see if maybe she'd be more willing to drink some fluids at home once her temperature went down, but if we couldn't manage that at home then we'd have to bring her to the hospital where she could get an IV. Fortunately her temperature did go down and she drank a few 5 oz bottles, had a few wet diapers, and played a lot. She also had a strawberry! She had her last bottle and fell asleep around 8:00 or 8:30 pm so I put her down in her crib. We woke her up about an hour ago for another dose of Motrin and to take her temp and it was up to 102.8. Her whole body was hot and sweaty again. We tried to give her a bottle but she refused it so we used a syringe to squirt some pedialyte into her mouth. She just seemed really tired so we let her go back to sleep and we'll just have to check on her again later. Hopefully her fever will go down and she'll be feeling better tomorrow. It's been a crazy couple of weeks for us. I just hope that our luck gets better before the end of the month. Howie gave me my first shot of Del Estrogen tonight. It wasn't too bad but I acted like a big baby until he gave me the shot. I didn't take any birth control today and oddly enough I'm not bleeding like crazy. When I'm taking the pill I bleed, when I don't take it I don't bleed. Right! That makes sense! Whatever, maybe it'll come tomorrow. We shall see.